Stepping down as Director of Technology

I'm writing you all with some news: Rhizome is looking for a new Director of Technology. Early next year, I will train in my successor and then step down. There's no need to say goodbye just yet, since I'll be around for a few more months. But now is as good a time as any for me to talk about why I'm going, and what it means for Rhizome.

Mainly, the reason I'm leaving is to pursue other projects. I don't want to say much more than that: Some of what I've got in mind is so nascent that to even describe it publically would be to give it too much credit. Working at Rhizome has been a fantastic experience, and a tremendous education. Now I want to take what I've learned and apply it to different kinds of problems, and unfortunately, that means I won't be able to give Rhizome the attention it deserves from its Director of Technology.

I've been at Rhizome for more than three years, and it's been a tumultuous time: Three Executive Directors, five offices (if you count the "virtual office" as one), three web servers, two membership policies. Somewhere in there I managed to write more than 20000 lines of Ruby code, not to mention the snippets of PHP and Perl required to stitch my new ideas into the code inherited from my predecessor Alex Galloway.

It wasn't for nothing. For one thing, we kept ourselves afloat financially--no small feat given the arts funding climate of the last few years. And we continued to innovate, with such additions as improved search, the front page reBlog, our Location feature, and commissions voting.

But the challenges aren't all behind us. The environment that Rhizome operates in is currently shaped by a number of broad questions--not the kind of questions you can ever answer definitively, but the kind that you ask in order to force yourself to see the landscape anew. We've been quite active in letting these questions inform our mission, and we'll continue to do so after I'm gone: What's Rhizome's role in a critical atmosphere that increasingly accepts new media art as just another facet of mainstream contemporary art? How will the art world take to the next wave of emerging technologies--be they blogs, del.icio.us, GreaseMonkey, or VOIP--and what part will Rhizome play in their adoption? And given our shoestring budget and staffing, how can we improve the feedback and participation we get from our thousands of Members and users?

These are difficult questions, and Rhizome will continue to face an uphill climb to financial stability, but I'm still optimistic about Rhizome's future. Our two-year-old affiliation with the New Museum of Contemporary Art provides us with much-needed administrative support and sound advice. And Rhizome is lucky to have a phenomenal staff. I've enjoyed working with Marisa Olson remotely, and she has already brought a lot of great ideas to Rhizome. Furthermore, Rhizome will be in excellent hands with Lauren Cornell. Since coming on in May, Lauren's been working tirelessly to absorb everything she can about this tremendously complex organzation, and already her drive is starting to pay off--whether in this year's energized fundraising effort, new collaborations such as our Open Call with free103point9, or the upcoming redesign. I'll miss working alongside Lauren, but if I'm lucky, from time to time she'll let me come around and make her nervous by watching her type. She loves that.

So, a little about how the transition will work: We'll be posting the opening today, at http://rhizome.org/jobs/19.php3 and other places, and we're hoping to begin the selection process immediately after the application deadline of January 1st. I'll be pretty involved in the selection process, the better to weed out candidates who don't possess the l33t h4xx0r sk1llz. We're expecting to spend a lot of time training, and I will write lots and lots of documentation. Those 20000 lines of code don't explain themselves, you know. Then I'll step out of the way, though I'll be around in some form or another.

If you know anybody who'd want to be our next Director of Technology, please send them our way. Who are we looking for, exactly? Hard to say. We want somebody who's smart and nice and who knows how to communicate and has the aforementioned l33t h4xx0r sk11lz. Somebody who'd give this job the energy and creativity it deserves. Somebody who wants the chance to make a difference in the lives of artists, curators, students, and teachers here in New York and around the world.

What else? Oh, yeah: Rhizome changed my life, so that's who we're looking for. Somebody who's in the mood to get their life changed.